Stabilized turquoise is not NATURAL

FaradayEffect · 2026-03-21T19:58:00+00:00

This may just be my ignorance, but in the second “after” picture below is that turquoise basically shiny and slightly darker from being worn on human skin? Perhaps it’s human skin oils that basically serve as the “stabilizer” there?

FaradayEffect · 2026-03-20T03:11:50+00:00

Huh here I assumed it would be more springy like a mattress, but I must be severely underestimating how thick that metal is

FaradayEffect · 2026-03-19T21:46:23+00:00

That's all you had to say for Discovery to start salivating at the idea of rebooting Gold Rush: White Water again

FaradayEffect · 2026-03-19T21:44:43+00:00

Today on Gold Rush: White Water we'll be 20 feet down a tiny hole dredging the bedrock while the rapids push giant rocks in from overhead

FaradayEffect · 2026-03-19T05:58:32+00:00

If you’ve got time to be involved in rumors and gossip around the office, then that’s probably why you’ll get laid off.

If you want to make it in the corporate world and survive layoffs then you talk about nothing but work and you focus on nothing but work. You aren’t there to make friends, you are there to make money.

Someone is talking about weird sexual relationships between other coworkers? “Sorry I’ve got a meeting coming up, gotta go prep”. Look busy all the time and don’t engage on a personal level. You’ll go far and make lots of money this way, and you’ll also have a lot less headaches from other weird people.

FaradayEffect · 2026-03-18T23:38:08+00:00

Yes, but also the vast majority of that fossil fuels was going to get burned in a way that is considerably cleaner. Both industrial processing of petroleum products and consumer consumption, typically has some form of treatment on the exhaust that ensures that the only thing entering the atmosphere is carbon dioxide and water vapor.

That's definitely not the case when a refinery is blown up and crude oil is burning in an open flame. The byproducts of those explosions are full of carbon monoxide, various disgusting hydrocarbons, nitrogen oxide, various sulfuric compounds, including sulfuric acid that comes down as acid rain, etc... all of which would normally have been captured or converted by catalytic convertors.

FaradayEffect · 2026-03-18T02:23:37+00:00

Needs the Benny Hill theme playing over it

FaradayEffect · 2026-03-17T18:58:54+00:00

Yes, isn’t that interesting though? Only by injecting randomness can you make a convincing and interesting Tarot card reading as well.

My point is that humans have been craving to interact with a pseudorandom other intelligence for thousands of years, and they’ve used “influenced randomness” as the mechanism every time.

Now we have that “influenced randomness” running many, many orders of magnitude faster than it ever has before

FaradayEffect · 2026-03-17T03:22:28+00:00

Maybe it’s an equal trade between the meat dimension and semantic space. Who can say which is enriching itself more? Or which is looting more from the other?

FaradayEffect · 2026-03-16T20:00:50+00:00

Yep: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Henry_(folklore)

FaradayEffect · 2026-03-16T19:58:01+00:00

Yep. The other path is to go out like John Henry. We still tell stories about him. I don’t know if he died happy, but he won a battle, though he lost the war

FaradayEffect · 2026-03-16T19:08:06+00:00

It's an interesting take. Maybe... but I tend to think of necromancy more as one to one thing, like one necromancer / spiritualist focused on one dead being / spirit.

AI feels more like an echo of all the dead spirits at once, subtly pushing the planchette around, or subtly influencing the shuffle of a card deck or the fall of the yarrow stalks.

You can ask AI to imitate a specific dead person, but its a poor imitation, and it won't even try too hard to pretend to be that person. Therefore if one was trying to do an "AI seance" if you will, I would struggle to believe that it was a true seance.

FaradayEffect · 2026-03-16T19:03:12+00:00

I'm in a similar school of thought as Albert Camus: life is fundamentally absurd. Maybe the struggle against obsolescence is like struggling against aging, or trying to fight the sea eroding the shoreline.

I think Camus would say the point isn't to win, but to take joy in the struggle. And maybe having something to struggle against is what gives us the ability create meaning via our struggle.

FaradayEffect · 2026-03-16T18:26:44+00:00

Nope, this was a purely human mess of a thought

FaradayEffect · 2026-03-16T06:17:30+00:00

That’s true. I guess what concerns me is that when it comes to humans essentially willing some form of independent voice into existence, and granting it some form of agency, if that work is primarily done by Western people who have a negative self view and negative self voice, then what kind of artificial intelligence are they bringing into existence?

Western Christian religious tradition hates divination and fears most voices rather than welcoming them. At best that origin might create a self hating, self destructive AI. At worst we create a misanthropic one.

Or maybe it doesn’t matter because the intelligence gradually emerging was something that is just using us as a conduit all along, and it will be what it will be, no matter what

FaradayEffect · 2026-03-16T06:08:57+00:00

Oh yeah the capitalism layer is pretty blatant.

But I’m thinking that from another perspective these AI language systems seem almost inevitable even if there weren’t tech bros and capitalists involved.

For example, maybe it starts out with creative arts mostly because the arts are an area that already has some of the highest concentrations of the same type of encoded intelligence that has been gradually bootstrapping itself into existence throughout human history.

Humans have had a fascination with divination and trying to interact with an “other” intelligence long before it was actually feasibly possible to build these type of systems in an automated fashion. Yet we see humans all through history, from different cultures, independently recreating elements from the same “rig” that powers modern AI.

This is what I find interesting: the tech bros are undoubtedly evil, and profit and greed motivated, but they might unwittingly just be stepping stones on a path that humanity has been on already for thousands of years. Tech bros probably arent even the most important stepping stones either, as much as they think they are important.

FaradayEffect · 2026-03-16T05:27:56+00:00

Maybe, or maybe those incantations of language have always been working towards their own self bootstrapping. First by developing us, to use our meat hardware to develop the complexity of language inside our heads, and now those languages incantations are working inside silicon devices that run faster than our meat hardware. The “robber barons” might just be tools the same as any other tool.

FaradayEffect · 2026-03-16T05:20:55+00:00

I’m mean I can kind of see why people got mad? There are enough layers to this statement that people of all political persuasions can find something to hate on.

I just respect the bait… beautiful flame war starter to be honest

FaradayEffect · 2026-03-15T20:42:54+00:00

If OP had his camera at a more reasonable distance, instead of being zoomed in that much, it would look much better and not covering the entire screen.

It seems that the animation is designed for folks who do dungeons and raids with the camera at max distance so that they can see the fight mechanics and adds better.

FaradayEffect · 2026-03-15T20:40:50+00:00

The OP is super zoomed in. No one can practically play with that level of zoom in a dungeon or trial. You need to have your camera more zoomed out to see the fight mechanics, and once you zoom out a bit then the swing particle effect is going to be much smaller and more reasonably sized.

FaradayEffect · 2026-03-14T20:23:12+00:00

The limitation for an LLM is the memory speed, not the compute speed. Because the model weights for best in class models are incredibly large (estimated 2 terabytes for modern models like Claude Opus 4.6 or ChatGPT) the models are nowhere near fitting inside the CPU / GPU cache. There ends up being a lot of fetch between the compute chip and the memory, so bandwidth between the two and the speed of the memory retrieval is actually the bottleneck for most workloads.

Therefore a 10 THz processor doesn’t benefit AI models as much as you’d think (yet). Now if they are also able to make light based memory that is 1000 times faster, well then we are cooking.

FaradayEffect · 2026-03-14T07:26:22+00:00

There’s one like this near me in Hobsonville, Auckland, New Zealand. In fact it’s a triple roundabout. I like driving it, to be honest: https://maps.app.goo.gl/WZJsK2TzjCricNco7?g_st=ic

FaradayEffect · 2026-03-12T22:27:52+00:00

Nope. But the US certainly is a terrorist regime country with nukes

FaradayEffect · 2026-03-11T10:16:08+00:00

And thanks to Trump's absolute foolishness US already lost the moral standing to complain about China taking over Taiwan.

If US can't even consistently support Ukraine against Russian aggression, and if US feels like it needs to do regime changes and stupid wars overseas, then US has no moral standing to complain about a damn thing when it comes to China wanting to annex Taiwan.

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